MDMD Grief & Insanity

[Judy Panetta]

What a poignant thought. These characters are often put in "impossible"
situations... disorienting, confusing, often accompanied by loss. How does
the "reasonable" human being react? Is it perhaps like Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principal...wherein one's perception of the other's reaction is
biased by one's standard or gauge of measurement (expectation?)...?

In other words...are these characters insane or rational? It depends upon
your point of view... And to stretch even further perhaps even your world
view: To accept chaos over striving for a determinant world...eeek!

You'd have to nuts.

Or would you...?

There's more here...anyone? Is Wicks delusional?

Best, Judy


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org]On
Behalf Of argirios zias
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 12:56 AM
To: davidmmonroe at yahoo.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: MDMD Grief & Insanity



Well, I was thinking, perhaps overt hinking, what with all these bad lines
being drawn and nobody's right if everybody's got a bomb, that Wicks is
crazy. Well, I think Oediapa, and Zoyd, Slothrop, Stencil, and even
Benny, maybe most of the narrators of P's novels are
insane.

As regards dear Ben, I simply can't believe a man would leave a girl like
Fina.

Anyway, we get twisted all up and around with Wicks, kinda like Stencil. We
twist into subjunctive, into
the quest for what might have been but for remembrances disturbed and
history tangling everything  up in the deep. Dive deep, Ishmael.

Isn't it possible that Wicks, who didn't get to attend Mason's funeral, nor
his burial, is in a state of
delirium brought on by his grief? And that his not having attended Mason's
burial, is the cause of his insanity?

We all have different ways of dealing with loss, with grief, with death.
That's cool. It will help me to deal with all this madness, if I can talk
about the madness in a fiction by Thomas R. Pynchon.

So, I will.

Gary